Archives for 2017

Now I know that title is a little over the top, and it assumes that we have a successful management program in place to begin with. Allow me to explain. I spoke at an event at Michigan State University. It was a wonderful event, focused on how they could take their new brand to the Read More

I’m just at the beginning of CMI’s six-city Master Class tour. It’s a blast to tour around the country and get to meet so many content marketers at these events. Two ideas came together for me recently – one from a class attendee in Boston, another from an article I read. The article was a Read More

An article that caught my eye this week speaks to a dilemma I often find myself facing when talking with content practitioners in business. The article, from Inc.com, quotes author Malcolm Gladwell: “My editor at the New Yorker magazine, David Remnick, is a better writer than 95% of the people who work for him. He’s Read More

There’s an old quote, usually attributed to Dwight Eisenhower, that goes, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” This is usually taken to mean that what’s valuable isn’t the plan itself but rather the planning process. We rarely hear the rest of that quote: “This is a very great distinction, because when you are planning Read More

Recently, Facebook held its 50th hackathon, a 24-hour Red Bull- and coffee-infused get-together where coders work on innovative applications or new features for existing products. These kind of events are legendary in Silicon Valley, of course; Facebook isn’t the only company to conduct them. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and just about every open-source organization on the Read More

There’s a saying, usually attributed to Hewlett Packard co-founder David Packard, that marketing is too important to leave to the marketing department. This sentiment has caused many marketing practitioners to lament that people throughout the business now have two jobs – their own and marketing. Sometimes it seems that everyone in the company has an Read More

Someone came up to me at a conference recently and paid our CMI team a compliment. She said, “I love how you guys constantly come up with such great content. Your team always has such useful pieces. How do you do it?” After of course saying “Thank you,” I said, “We do the quiet work.” Read More

In his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t, Jim Collins talks at some length about being a hedgehog. What’s that, you say? Well, the story of “The Hedgehog and the Fox” is originally attributed to a phrase by the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but Read More

When I first came to Los Angeles, one of my screenwriting instructors told me something that I still find invaluable today. He said, “When you have a story, outline it, abstract it, even write it without considering whether it will be a novel, a screenplay or a television show. If you start with the form, Read More

I’m just coming off of an immensely satisfying business gathering that I’ve not missed over many years. It’s a gathering of some of the smartest, most emotionally connected people I’ve ever met. (How I ever got invited, I don’t know – but they’re stuck with me now.) One of our many topics was the question Read More